Seven years in prison in Russia for criticizing the death of children in Ukraine

Alexei Gorinov will spend his birthday – this Monday he turns 61 – in jail.

The crime of this district councilor in Moscow was to criticize in a municipal plenary session the organization of an event on the occasion of Children's Day when the Russian offensive in Ukraine had already begun.

“Tell me, please, how can we be debating a children's drawing contest for Children's Day (...) when, among us, children are being killed every day?

For your information, I will tell you that a hundred minors have died in Ukraine, and there are children who have been orphaned.

The grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who participated in World War II”, were the words that have led the politician to be sentenced this month to seven years in prison.

Days before that plenary session of the Krasnoselski district, held on March 17, the law that punishes "the discrediting of the Armed Forces" and "the knowing dissemination of false information" had been approved in Parliament. .

The norm has fallen with all its weight on several of the seven politicians who participated in that meeting, all of them well-known figures in Moscow: Gorinov is in jail;

Elena Kotiónochkina, current president, has had to flee Russia;

and councilor (called a district deputy in Russia) Ilia Yashin was sent to pretrial detention a week ago for a video he posted on his YouTube channel about the Bucha massacre.

A sentence of years in the shadow hangs over him.

Only one councilwoman voted in favor of the children's contest.

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Last minute of the war in Ukraine

Gorinov was sentenced by article 207.3 of the Russian criminal code, approved on March 4 and which provides for prison sentences of up to 15 years.

The prisoner and his colleague Kotiónochkina, "knowing the illegal and dangerous nature of their actions for society, pushed the population into a state of anxiety, restlessness and defenselessness from the Government, motivated by political hatred, with disdain, antipathy and aggressiveness towards the organs of power of the Russian Federation”, maintains the sentence, of 26 pages.

The

against the defendant, accepted by the Meschhanski district court, was a couple of war reports from the Ministry of Defense that defined the Russian action in Ukraine as a special operation "and did not mention the death of children";

an article published by the spokeswoman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Maria Zajárova, entitled

;

and the friendship agreements signed by Vladimir Putin with the self-proclaimed people's republics of Donetsk and Lugansk (in eastern Ukraine).

To this was added the testimony of a recent graduate who said he had seen the recording and considered what he said "unfair."

“My grandparents fought against fascism.

Calling a country that fought against fascism fascist is not correct”, is the testimony collected in the sentence.

That March 17, while in the Moscow district they were discussing the children's contest, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights confirmed that at least 22 adolescents and 36 children had died during the offensive in Ukraine, "although the real figures they are significantly older”, as recognized by the body of which Russia itself is a part.

A search warrant weighs on Kotiónochkina.

In the recording of that municipal session, still posted on the Internet, the president of the plenary warned that her country was on its way to being "a fascist state."

The politician proposed to reformulate the contest with the theme of "children against the war in Ukraine", while Gorinov added that all efforts of civil society "must be directed solely to stop the war and withdraw Russian troops from Ukraine".

“You are obsessed”, replied the district councilor who later voted in favor of holding the children's contest.

After Gorinov's conviction, more than two dozen well-known Russian human rights lawyers and activists published an open letter denouncing that the new article of the criminal code and others related to the discrediting of the army violate the Constitution.

Specifically, they would undermine the recognition of ideological and political diversity as the basis of Russia's constitutional order (article 13 of the Basic Law);

the freedom to hold and spread one's own convictions (article 28);

freedom of thought and speech (article 29), and the prohibition of arbitrary criminal prosecution (article 54).

“A politician cannot be sentenced to jail for presenting his position in a session,” underlines Nikolai Rybakov, president of Yábloko, one of the few independent parties that survives in Russia and that demands “stop the murder of people” in Ukraine.

“We will try to do politics as long as there is an opportunity, but there is some difficulty.

They already killed in the 1990s, even under the government of [Boris] Yeltsin, politicians who represented Yábloko for their political and human rights actions”, he underlined during the conversation.

"This is not a new level, but the logical continuation of everything that has happened so far," he added.

The terror of being revealed

With the new law, giving an opinion is dangerous and anyone can be the complainant.

Independent media such as

had to delete editorials for describing the military action on Ukraine as a war, and several cases of denunciations have been raised.

In April, a teacher at a school in Penza, in the center of the European part of Russia, was accused before the police by two students who secretly recorded her.

They asked her why Russian athletes couldn't compete in Europe, and she blamed the country for her.

That same month, Dmitri Bayev, a priest from a small Russian town, fled the country when he was prosecuted for calling for an end to the conflict and for Putin to be brought before an international court.

He escaped, but not another cleric from Saint Petersburg, Ioann Kurmoyarov, detained since June 7 and who could be sentenced to jail for saying on YouTube things like "those who have unleashed this aggression will not go to heaven" and "if you don't mind what is happening in Ukraine, you are not Christians”.

Today's sentences are for accusations at the beginning of the offensive, but the persecution continues.

This same week, criminal proceedings were opened against the independent councilor of the Siberian city of Novosibirsk Helga Pigorova, for the same laws on disinformation and discrediting of the Russian army.

The policy, which had been supported in the Siberian capital by the team of the opposition Alexei Navalni, criticized in a tweet the sumptuousness of the burials of the military dead in Ukraine and later apologized for having been carried away "by emotion".

“I would like to resurrect you all, slap you on the cheeks and let you go back to your graves.

In vain they arranged such a lavish funeral for them,” she had written.

"You hear about the fines and sentences imposed against more or less famous people, but there is also a significant number of unknown people who are also being denounced," says the leader of Yábloko.

Rybakov warns that "people are turning to the authorities to accuse other people and it is not known what happens to them," he adds.

The demonstrations at the beginning of the offensive have died down due in part to the repression of the new laws.

The OVD Info portal, specialized in monitoring the protests, has confirmed 16,380 arrests since February.

For its part, the independent polling center Levada found at the end of June that barely 55% of Russians follow the news about Ukraine, and a large part of them are older people.

In addition, no protest is authorized by the authorities on the grounds of "avoiding the spread of the coronavirus";

not even when it comes to individual protests.

However, those same authorities do celebrate massive acts of propaganda with the bureaucratic excuse that they are not public events, but rather private "festive, sporting or tribute" acts, according to Rybakov.

“People are arrested.

We will only call demonstrations if we know it will be safe”, adds the Yábloko leader.

To reinforce the persecution of any criticism, Putin signed on July 14 the reform of the law of foreign agents.

This rule goes beyond requesting details of the origin of the income of the organizations subject to scrutiny and allows the prohibition of any political activity of those affected.

With the new legislation, the Kremlin will not only be able to ban those organizations or activists that receive any kind of funding from outside the country, but also those it considers to be "under foreign influence", from journalists to NGOs and political parties that do not defend Putin's Russia.

This past Friday the already huge blacklist of foreign agents was expanded.

Actress Tatiana Lazareva responded on Telegram that she felt "finally relaxed" about being part of the Kremlin-recognized critics' club.

The mayor Ilia Yashin was also included in it, pending to know if he will have to share jail with councilor Gorinov.

The politician will hear his sentence in the coming months, as will his colleague Vladimir Kara-Murza, who suffered poisoning in 2015 and 2017 and has now been accused of telling "deliberately false information about the use of the Armed Forces" during a trip to the United States. Russian forces to bomb residential areas and social infrastructure, including maternity clinics, hospitals and schools in Ukraine.

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